


Uncharted Space

by acidpop25



Category: VAST (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Alien Sex, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, First Time, Frottage, Hand Jobs, Interspecies Relationship(s), Interspecies Romance, Interspecies Sex, M/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-01
Updated: 2017-09-01
Packaged: 2018-12-22 11:10:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11966151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acidpop25/pseuds/acidpop25
Summary: Noble Defender has too much on his mind, and Rayk's attempt to lighten the mood leads somewhere unexpected. Canon divergence from episode 1.11, "Links," where they had some time (and consciousness) back on the Avalon before all hell broke loose.





	Uncharted Space

“Are you–” Rayk starts, then thinks better of it. “How are you doing, man?”

“I…” Noble Defender chuffs out a dry sound, too humorless to really be called a laugh, but something close to it. “Not great. It’s been… a lot to take in.”

“Yeah.” Rayk sits down next to Noble on the edge of the bed. “If you want to talk about it–”

“No,” Noble interjects, just a little too fast. “I mean, thanks, but–”

“No, it’s cool. I get it.” Rayk pats Noble on the shoulder. “Listen, that was some _badass_ flying out there today, man.”

That puts a grin on Noble’s face, wide and crinkling the corners of his eyes. “Told you I was gonna show you something.”

“You flew this thing like it was a fighter, it was hot as hell.”

“Hot…?” Noble echoes, and Rayk’s lips tug into a crooked smirk.

“Sexy,” he clarifies, and there’s a low rumbling note in his voice that seems to hook into the pit of Noble’s belly and tug. He is reminded, suddenly, that fight in the deep ocean: the swift, merciless competence of Rayk’s shot from the darkness that made the hungry jaws around Noble’s body go slack, and he thinks he understands what Rayk means. A hand still rests on Noble’s shoulder, and his awareness of it becomes acute. His cheeks, his skin, _everything_ feels suddenly hot and prickling.

“Rayk,” Noble says, and his voice comes out deeper and quieter than he’s used to.

“You’re blushing,” Rayk says, and there’s amusement in his tone but it’s kind all the same. “What? No way I’m the only one who’s noticed.”

Noble almost looks away, but it’s not his nature to back down. “Brightest Eye,” he says simply, and he sees the moment that it clicks, the moment that Rayk realizes what he means.

“I guess I can see how you might not exactly be their thing,” Rayk agrees, “but I’m a little less… narrow.” His eyes search Noble’s for a long moment, and he withdraws the hand from Noble’s shoulder. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, though. Sorry, I just– I flirt with people, it’s kind of a habit.”

“You didn’t. Well, you did, but it’s not– it wasn’t _bad_ ,” Noble says, hating how he stumbles over the words. He isn’t even certain he could explain himself in Brightest Eye, but doing it in this new language makes it even worse, like he’s fumbling blind for the unfamiliar words to express an entirely new sentiment. The fluttering, warm feeling at the core of him, flattered and alive with possibility at Rayk’s words; the darker, sharper thing like _want_ , but a want that has teeth. None of it is what he would call comfortable, unfamiliar as it is. 

Rayk blows out a breath. “I’m glad. I don’t want to– I didn’t mean for this conversation to go this way. Fuck, after today, you probably aren’t in any state to–”

“This has been the best thing that’s happened to me all day, honestly,” Noble answers– and then adds, because there’s still a worried crease on Rayk’s brow, “Well, second after schooling you at flying.”

“Oh, so it’s like that, huh,” Rayk retorts, but his expression eases and the smile is back, softer than before. Noble is struck again by the same feeling he’d had when they first met, stunned by the simple fact of his existence. Even then, with no common language between them, Rayk’s charm had communicated itself as an almost palpable thing, friendly and steadying. And though Noble hadn’t had the chance to examine the thought at the time, he’d never met another being and thought them handsome, not until Rayk.

“Course it is.” Noble’s heart is thudding hard in his chest. Physical urges aren’t new to him, but they have always been a hazy, nonspecific thing, generalized the same way exhaustion is. This, this specific want of one person, of _Rayk_ , is heady and new. “Rayk, can I…” Can he what? He isn’t even sure what he’s asking, not really; he doesn’t even know how a Kiraeyi body works.

Two hands cup Noble’s jawline. “You can. Do you know how to kiss?”

Noble racks his brain for the vocabulary– it doesn’t translate into Brightest Eye, but the definition is there. “Well, I know what it is.”

Rayk’s smirk gentles. “C’mere.” He tugs Noble in as he leans forward and presses their mouths together. The softness of him is both wonderfully strange and achingly akin– soft fur, soft lips, unfamiliar yet known, more like Noble than any being he grew up with. It’s an objectively strange way to express affection, but something in Noble rings with it like a struck bell, clear and bright as Rayk swipes between Noble’s lips with a tongue only slightly flatter and rougher than his own. The want he’s been feeling intensifies, desire entwined with physical arousal for the first time.

“Okay?” Rayk murmurs against Noble’s mouth.

“Yeah. Good.” Noble slides his arms around Rayk at the command of some buried primal knowledge, and Rayk reciprocates with the set of hands not cupping Noble’s face and sliding into his hair. “I think this is– good. Better than just…” better than being trapped alone in his head with questions but no answers, a past he doesn’t remember, a grief he can’t forget.

“You need a distraction,” Rayk suggests for him, “something else to feel.”

“Yes. If you want to.”

“I’ve been a port in a storm before,” Rayk replies, “I’m cool with it. You’re my friend, man.”

Something about that unsettles Noble rather than reassures him, for reasons he can’t articulate. “You’re mine, too.” 

Rayk smiles at him, and it’s that same devastating charm but warmer. “You tell me if I do anything you don’t like, or if you wanna stop.”

“Have you done this with– a Terran?” It still feels strange to call himself that, but it’s what he _is_ , biologically if not necessarily philosophically, which is all that matters at the moment.

“Let’s just say I know what I’m doing,” Rayk demurs, and one set of clever fingers start undoing Noble’s jacket and sliding it from his shoulders. Noble exhales a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding and kisses him again, copying Rayk’s earlier approach– but Rayk is letting him lead, Noble realizes with a little sharp jolt of adrenaline. Rayk tastes unfamiliar– who knows what Kiraeyi even eat– but pleasantly so, and the points of his cuspids are surprisingly sharp. This, Noble learns when Rayk lets one catch at Noble’s bottom lip, and Noble can feel him smiling as he does.

“You can touch me, too,” Rayk says, and in truth Noble hadn’t even realized he wasn’t, too distracted by the newness of it all. He doesn’t need a second prompting, though, to start unclasping the Peacekeep uniform that Rayk still has on and run his hands through the sleek fur he finds there. Rayk’s coat seems to cover all of him, though it grows thickest and longest on his head and finest on his palms. The texture is like Noble’s own hair, though the fur seems straighter and denser. Rayk makes a sound when Noble strokes his hands through it, an almost rumbling noise that seems to be pleased, if the way Rayk sways into the touch is any indicator.

“That’s nice,” Rayk sighs, arching his spine. Dexterous fingers, nimble as Noble’s own from years at the helm of a ship, work Noble out of the borrowed Peacekeep suit as well before Rayk flops back on the bed, squirming the rest of the way out of his own clothing as he does so. “Get down here.”

Noble kneels over him, legs on either side of Rayk’s hips and his weight braced on one arm to leave his other hand free to keep running over Rayk’s torso, fingers through his fur. Rayk’s pleased rumble deepens, a low vibration in his chest that Noble feels as much as hears. Rayk, for his part, has taken advantage of the opportunity to get all four hands on Noble, caressing the skin seemingly everywhere at once.

“You have,” Noble pants, “an unfair advantage.”

“You complaining?” Rayk teases, but then he’s moving and tumbling Noble to the mattress, effectively reversing their positions. Rayk still has two free hands even when he’s holding himself suspended over Noble’s body, but now so does Noble. He hadn’t even tried to stop Rayk from pinning him, which is… unlike him, really, but the weight of Rayk’s body on his feels good, and right now all Noble wants is to feel good, to feel _anything_ besides grief and pain and anger. So when Rayk kisses along the vulnerable line of Noble’s neck, down to bite at the bend of it with those sharp little Kiraeyi teeth, Noble groans and lets him do it, fingers gripping tight at Rayk’s hip.

“No complaints,” Noble says, and Rayk grins at him and sits back. He doesn’t bother to hide the long, slow sweep of his gaze, but he also isn’t hiding his appreciation of what he sees– it’s as plain on his face as it is physically evident. Whatever Kiraeyi call theirs, it looks a lot like Noble’s: the tip is slightly textured and comes to a narrower point, and it stiffens out from a thin sheath of protective skin, but Noble is pretty sure he knows how it’ll work.

“Me either. Take it from me: I’ve met a few Terrans, and you’re gorgeous.” Rayk leans back down and wraps a hand around Noble’s cock and strokes up it in a long, slow touch that makes Noble’s hips jerk reflexively and the breath snare in his throat. It’s like touching himself and yet completely _not_ like that, and not only because of the soft fuzz on Rayk’s hands. The intimacy of doing this with another person pressed close on the standard-issue bed is a different thing altogether. Noble uses his hold on Rayk to pull him in closer and align their lower bodies to arch up against him. Rayk makes a noise in the back of his throat and shudders in a small but full-body tremble that goes all the way down to the tip of his tail, which twitches against Noble’s leg. 

“Like this?” Rayk pants out against Noble’s throat as he rolls his hips.

“S’good,” Noble murmurs, “keep going.” Even if he had any other ideas, he doesn’t want to stop this. His mind feels hazy with the sensual pleasure of it, mounting slowly but inexorably like the rising tide, and the newness of the experience is tempered by the kinship he’s felt with Rayk since the day they first met. There’s something reassuring about him, almost comforting when they’re pressed this close, that makes it easy to let everything else slip away. Just the two of them, two bodies wrapped up in one another and cut off from anything outside this room.

Rayk falls apart first, the fluidity of his movement scattered into a last few seeking, desperate jerks and a half-stifled yowling noise of pleasure moaned into Noble’s shoulder. Noble wraps his arms tight around Rayk as he trembles breathlessly through the aftershocks, and as soon as Rayk has his wits back Noble finds himself being kissed again, almost fiercely.

“Let me,” Rayk says, and without explaining further he slides down, mussing all his fur along the way, and closes his mouth around Noble’s cock. He’s careful of his teeth, mindful of how he uses his tongue; all Noble registers is the staggeringly perfect heat of it as he slides down Rayk’s throat. Noble groans, babbling, probably not even in Basic, possibly not even in _words_ , and one hand flails helplessly for an anchor. Rayk gives it to him, lacing their fingers together and letting Noble clutch hard as he shatters under Rayk with a ragged cry.

Rayk drapes himself over Noble as he heaves for breath, the heavy rise-and-fall of his chest apparently not a deterrent to Rayk using it as a pillow. One pointed ear twitches absently against Noble’s shoulder as they lie there; it’s a little too hot, really, and Rayk’s fur is sticking to Noble’s sweaty skin, but the minor discomfort of temperature is outweighed by how nice the closeness feels. For a long time they just lie there in silence, or nearly– Rayk is still making that soft contented rumble, though it’s almost inaudible now. Noble loops an arm around Rayk’s shoulders, absently stroking over the fur with his fingertips, and he’s drifting close to sleep when Rayk speaks.

“Are you good?”

Noble sighs a little and doesn’t open his eyes. “Yeah. I will be.”

**Author's Note:**

> This was based off a self-prompt for Rayk/Noble competency kink after that amazing piloting roll, but instead it grew Feels because it was obvious by the end of the episode that Noble is not... coping well.


End file.
